The Statistics of Spirit Boxes

My boyfriend, Alex, and I have been really into the popular Buzzfeed show “Unsolved” . It stars two young guys — Ryan (a believer), and Shane (a skeptic) — who travel to supposedly haunted locations in search of paranormal activity. It’s really well edited and extremely entertaining, even for non-believers like us (aka “shaniacs”).

Recently, they introduced a new toy into their investigations: the so-called spirit box. This is basically just a radio scanner. In other words, it scans through about five radio stations per second. People listen to this output and hope to hear a ghost communicate by manipulating the radio signal to create words. (Yeah it sounds ridiculous.)

Ryan and Shane actually do hear many phrases that sound like a human voice. These phrases are greater than 1/5th of a second, so, in theory, multiple radio stations need to conspire together to create these phrases. One of the most telling examples is when Ryan asks a “ghost” what color jacket he is wearing and the spirit box seems to say: “brown and white”. See the clip below: